Sunday, July 20, 2014

longest yarn

The use of symbols in my work takes on a slightly different form. Rather than presenting a single image to stand for an idea or belief, I am compiling images to represent tropes, as a form of packaged thought. Trope is a Greek word that means turn, direction, or way-it is a literary device that works like a motif or cliché. I trend toward using this device in the Michel Foucault sense of addressing the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are related to forms of personal or social control. I am relying on the relationships of multiple images in proximity to each other to inform the viewer and to assist them in the creation of meaning. The images are graphically direct and mostly representational within a range of personal abstraction to emphasize or de-emphasize relationships between ideas within tropes. I perceive these thought packages as interacting with ideas, and I see the ideas as living in the spaces between people or power and structures of belief. For example, a city skyline would fall under “city trope” and all the activity and the control structures associated with that system would be built into a silhouette or detailed representation of buildings.
Here are a few of the active tropes and their representative actions in my current work . Increasingly I am discovering their intrinsic dualistic assertions of the mundane and super mundane :
• Hair - human and animal. This representation is meant to convey a sense of bestial or primal nature. I find hair can also represent humanity in a humble light in the sense that hair is uncontrollable to some degree when it grows in places seen as socially unacceptable. Hair can also be used as an invitation to touch or indulge, with either pleasure or repulsion. This also implies voluntary loss of control. Other situations where I represent the use of hair is when I am trying to convey gender, life style or demographics.
A more complex use of hair occurs when I am attempting to denote a particular biological process associated with a terrestrial perspective of reality as oppose to a non terrestrial based speculation of reality. Examples of the variety of hair I am using are: chest hair, long hair, short hair, style of hair, pubic hair, dominatrix hair, clown hair or theatrical hair.
• Flesh- The functions of representations of flesh is very similar and often employed in conjunction with hair. Examples of the types of flesh I use are: Nude or clothed, bubbly flesh,old flesh, pressed flesh,and gravity filled flesh.
• Deconstructed clothing
Collar structures, stitching, shoes, soles, saddle stitches, socks, shirt collars, buttons, and belts are used in my work to denote class or social position. I also use detailed taxonomies of clothing as an indication of labor and self reliance. I personally take pride in being able to sew and maintain my own clothes.
• Buildings
I find buildings can be used as indications of social identity. Building elements can also act as extensions of body and body awareness and our relationship to our own mind or how we perceive and negotiate a sense of reality. These tropes might include ledges as indications of interior and exterior boundaries, windows as planes of transient awareness and experience with “the other” as a semi permeable membrane or boundary, gargoyles as guardians in the traditional sense of spiritual vulnerability, air conditioners (atmospheric control on a mundane level-personal awareness and relinquished control subconsciously), dumpsters as stages in our systems of elimination rejection waste or compromise with inefficient systems of commercial or material based cultural superstructures, skylines, cities, suburbs, rooflines and light industrial architectural language. The use of buildings as a device can also imply social density and myths of cultural awareness associated with varying demographics.
• Non terrestrial space- This could also be called the speculative fiction trope as I use these elements to convey a sense of other and to potentially highlight traditional attitudes toward colonization or aggressive exploitation of weakness, aggressive use of victim advocacy or to reassure-assert ones own position of power and powerlessness. This is depicted as life support systems (space suits ^deconstructed clothing ^ ) or hegemonic real-estate of the atomic age, that includes pet dinosaurs and objectified human body parts. Less direct components of this trope may include : vehicles of exploration, Boundary-less forms (nebula), trans-dimensional forms of life yet discovered, much less comprehensible to earthly paradigms of informational manipulation or Victorian era age of reason classification.
• Deviant behavior –I depict the cultural practice of deviant or behavioral resistance to social norms as an exploration of how people come to terms with ideas that are seen to be culturally threatening. Aggressive sexual posturing combined with partial or full nudity, latex, costumes or masks are meant to convey autonomy or at least passive aggressive sovereignty.
So, these are just some of the devices I am using in an attempt to help the viewer find and create meaning in my works.